From Charta 77 to Charta 25: An Intergenerational Dialogue on Human Rights and Democracy
4 July 2026
On 20 May, I travelled to Prague to attend a closed-door roundtable session organised by the European Democracy Youth Network in partnership with the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. The theme of the roundtable session was Democratic Resilience Under Pressure: Addressing Disinformation and Polarisation Beyond Elections.
The main mission of the IYTT, however, was to seize the opportunity of a special session slotted in-between discussions during which we could present Charta 25 in the form of an intergenerational lunch-talk. We co-organized the talk together with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, in which Urban serve as a Global Fellow 2026.
Previously, the IYTT has been pursuing efforts to get in contact with an original signatory of the Charta 77, which served as the inspiration and template for the Charta 25. The Prague roundtable event on May 20 was the moment these aspirations finally came true, as we were scheduled to meet Jarmila Johnová, a signatory from 1977. I will share some brief reflections on the roundtable session that Urban and I had the honour to attend, as well as on the undeniable highlight of the day: the intergenerational dialogue with Jarmila.
After a few opening remarks, the roundtable was kicked off by two expert sessions centred around “Disinformation Targeting Democratic Institutions & Media”. Diverse representatives presented their chilling research on disinformation campaigns in Herzegovina and Latvia, police violence, accelerated legislative procedures and the challenges of election observers in Georgia and Hungary. Counterstrategies were discussed, such as public Excel lists on fake observers. A core leverage point that attendees identified was that a state seeks credibility both internally and externally, and people were mulling over the power of “naming and shaming”. The whole session was a stark reminder that disinformation (re-)shapes institutional structures. Disinformation was framed as violence, the violation of truth.
The expert sessions culminated in moving testimonies by Andra Balan, former secretary of state from Romania, and Nino Dolidze, Executive Director of “The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED)” from Georgia. This was by far the most powerful contribution. They pushed to the front of the conversation the fact that disinformation is gendered, sharing examples of seamless political repression of women in Czechia and Pakistan through the simplest of edits and AI imagery. Both speakers described being victims of such campaigns to the point that their children were also subjected to harassing phone calls. Andra Balan shared the need to also focus on the mental health impacts of such campaigns. Their stories emphasised how the failure to safeguard women and queer people in politics carries a huge price tag. How effortless democratic exclusion occurs, and how great a loss democracy suffers as a result of the pre-emptive deterrence of women from entering politics.
Urban and I met 77-year-old Jarmila at the entrance. She was accompanied by a friend, and they were already comfortably sitting on a couch discussing a movie. We shared some light-hearted small talk, and her friend leaned over to me to say “she doesn’t know how to stop” with regard to talking about her activism, especially her work at Prague Mothers. The Prague Mothers initiative, which fought for representation of women’s, children’s, and environmental concerns in the political restructuring of Czechia after the Velvet Revolution, was later renamed Walk the City. Jarmila shared in a conversation with me that Prague Mothers was also a term instrumentalised by the communist government, so they had an interest in distancing themselves from a historically charged term such as that one. The small talk during lunch and after the event with Jarmila and her friend was just as enriching to me as the officially recorded intergenerational dialogue. We had an interesting conversation about the role of intergenerational dialogue “on the streets”, with Jarmila commenting that each country also has a different pub culture, with some being more prone to casual intergenerational exchange than others.
Started off with opening remarks from Ileana Marin, Kettering Foundation program officer for Democracy around the Globe, the dialogue with Jarmila was immensely rewarding. The stories of retaliation and bravery that Jarmila shared continued the spirit of the gendered disinformation session, and made me think of the importance of recognising democratic backsliding as soon as possible and the privilege to call it out with still as of yet little retaliation. I had the impression that the listeners were able to each resonate with a different part of the conversation, evoking a sense of comradeship in the room. The conversation ended with closing remarks from Bradley Rourke, Kettering Foundation chief external affairs officer and director, DC Operations, on a positive note in regard to the elections of Mundani and Magyar.
After the conversation, many attendees came up to me, asking where they could sign the Charta 25, which I took as a positive sign. Most special of all was Jarmila coming up to me afterwards and telling me how moved she was that young people from the IYTT were continuing the legacy of the chartists in 1977. The whole experience was incredibly humbling, and I hope to claim that I gained a new friend in Jarmila, commencing the intergenerational ties that lie inherent in Charta 08, Charta 77 and Charta 25.
